Mumbai: New research from Omdia reveals that nonlinear viewing continues to gain greater hegemony in the daily viewing habits of TV users across the US, Europe, and Australia. Online long form and social media video viewing is growing beyond the previous year’s boom in viewing time.
Omdia’s new 'Cross-Platform Television Viewing Time Report – 2022' finds that across all the markets covered, the average total daily viewing time reached 362 minutes per person per day in 2021 (six hours and two minutes), down 0.5 per cent on last year. Declines in linear TV, online short form and pay TV VoD account for this minor drop in viewing, with the former seeing the sharpest falls. Growth in online long form and social media video viewing, however, counterbalanced these declines, leaving overall viewing to drop by just two minutes.
Linear TV viewing time decreased in all markets in 2021. The end of restrictions and lockdowns that marked most of 2020 was the primary cause, with the continual shift toward on-demand viewing also driving this.
Omdia’s TV and Online Video team senior analyst Rob Moyser commented, "In highly developed markets such as the US and the UK, 2021 will likely be the last year where linear TV predominates over non-linear TV viewing. On a platform-by-platform level, however, linear TV still remains, by some distance, the most popular way to watch TV in the markets covered."
Online long form was a key area of growth across all markets, driven largely by incumbent online subscription services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+, and the launch of several new OTT services such as Discovery+ and Paramount+. In total, long-form viewing grew by eight minutes, reaching 68 minutes, eight minutes ahead of social media video viewing.
Time spent viewing video content on social media platforms increased by nine minutes in 2021 to an average of 60 minutes per person per day across the nine markets analysed. TikTok was the standout performer for video growth during the year, with the platform set to overtake Facebook in total time spent for the first time in 2022.
